The Democrats had up for governor their strong man that year, Ephraim K. Smart, who had been several terms in congress, and made the biggest possible fight that lay in their power, but all to no purpose. The speeches of Mr. Blaine fixed the attention of the state upon him, as coming from a man away beyond his years. He could, we are told, “marshal statistics with great facility”; facts, figures, faces, he knew them all, and impressed the people, even the old campaigners, with a boundlessness of political and historical knowledge that is distinctly remembered to this day.
They have gotten use to this sort of thing up in Maine, and talk like men who reached their conclusions years ago. Their minds were made up as to the man in Augusta, at least over a quarter of a century ago, away back in 1856, some of them when, fresh from the Philadelphia convention, he made his Frémont and Dayton speech, twenty-eight years ago, and he has simply been expanding, and enlarging, filling up, and growing ever since. He has been watched with eager pride and rejoiced in with the devotion of brothers and friends, as wave after wave of his majestic influence has dashed across the boundary lines of the state, and broken over the nation.
It would have been something unaccountable if every round of the ladder had not been touched at last by him, and yet there is no fatality about it. He was no child of destiny, but of industry; no creature of chance, but of choice; not of luck, but of pluck; not of fortune, but of fortitude; not of circumstance, but of courage and consecrated energy.
He returned home from his first view of Washington with larger views of the nation’s greatness, and the fierceness of the contests that were testing her strength, and a holier ambition to make every power tell for Liberty’s victory, and the nation’s emancipation from wrong, and her projection upon a loftier career of service among the nations of the earth.
The state could not hold him long after the revelation of these few brief days and weeks. But he could wait his time, meanwhile reorganizing all the forces at his command for victory of a larger kind, and in a larger field than had fallen to his lot. And why not? He was fast outgrowing the places filled thus far, and others were opening to him without the asking.
The plans for the new year are all laid before the old year dies. Then he shall stand nearer the seat of war; then he shall study questions and characters, plans and persons, opinions, policies, and principles, all the great states and machinery of government. His home shall be in the great city and centre of the land, where authority, wisdom, and power reside, and where no excellence but is in demand, no great, shining quality but shall shine amid a thousand reflections, and name and place shall but increase each power to serve and save the nation’s life.
IX.
SECOND TERM AS SPEAKER.
